In 1979, I left northern California, where I cut my literary teeth as editor/publisher of Beatitude magazine and Beatitude Press (one of the first magazines to publish the Beat poets during the 1950s), and returned to the North Carolina mountains of my boyhood with the idea of beginning something of a literary bioregional tradition here in a part of the country that was generally considered to be `the boondocks' of the American literary landscape. Having, in California, been at the epicentre of a burgeoning Bioregional/Greens movement while keeping company with some of its founding literary fathers such as Gary Snyder, Peter Berg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure, it seemed only natural that the imprint of my first publishing venture should be `New Native Press' - an amalgam of bioregionalism and the Beats.

James Laughlin's New Directions has always been a publishing model for me, and I've been interested in the international aspects of the literary world. In my days as an editor of Beatitude in San Francisco, the issues I edited were heavy with translations - Russian, Spanish, French, German, Italian... So, this has been carried over to my oeuvre as a publisher. To date, NNP has published work by authors from France, Hungary, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and India, in addition to those from the United States. All this interest in contemporary international literature came to a climax with the publication in 1998 of the Celtic language anthology Writing The Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (The New Celtic ...